CAIRO — The diesel fuel Egypt has supplied to the Gaza Strip is but a drop in the bucket toward easing Gaza’s power crisis, but there is hope the gesture might signal a thaw in Egypt's relations with the Hamas-run Gaza government and possibly open the flow of trade.

Egyptian authorities opened the Rafah border crossing to the Gaza Strip June 21-24 to allow in Egyptian industrial diesel for Gaza's sole power plant, which has been offline more than two months. Since then, the plant has received intermittent deliveries of Egyptian diesel fuel through the Rafah crossing.

But even as Egypt has been supplying energy, Israel has been taking it away at the request of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank. Hamas and the PA split violently in 2007, leaving Fatah and PA President Mahmoud Abbas with the West Bank and Hamas governing the Strip. The PA, which has been pressuring Hamas financially in several ways recently, has said it will no longer foot the bill for the electricity Gaza receives through 10 Israeli power lines. On June 19, Israel began to gradually cut back the electricity.

In a statement, the Gaza Energy Authority said, “Israel has so far reduced the power lines arriving into Gaza from 120 to 36 megawatts [MW], so the Gaza Energy Authority has directly purchased Egyptian diesel itself and the power plant will continue to operate as long as diesel is available, and electricity will be distributed according to the available power."